Episode 210: The Priming of the American Mind (with Jesse Singal)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] You speak the truth, my man. The truth only means something if the person who is listening understands it. The Queen in Oz has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. I'm a very good man.

[00:00:54] They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to anybody who can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:18] Dave, today we have Jesse Singal coming on the show in the second segment. Did you hunker down? Are you ready for the tweet shitstorm we're going to get? I'm afraid. I don't like Twitter meanness. I still... Even just reading Jesse's feed stresses me out. Because they don't play.

[00:01:42] They'll fuck you up. Fucking studio gangsters is what they are. Possibly. We don't know. Real gangsters don't tweet. Now there's another tweet shitstorm. Twitch storm? What's the fucking... Tweet storm? That's what we have coming on in the second segment. We talk about his new book on social psychology.

[00:02:12] We talk about... We get into a little bit of a culture war debate. So that's coming up. But before that something much less controversial. Yeah, so last episode something happened that surprised both of us.

[00:02:27] I said that I wasn't convinced that there aren't ghosts or spirit entities of some kind. And then you and Paul both first thought I was joking. Paul just thought all of a sudden he had transported to some alternate universe or something like that.

[00:02:46] And it's funny because I was just as surprised that you guys reacted that way. Yeah, my jaw dropped. Yeah, right. Yes, and maybe we've never talked about this stuff. But yeah, I kind of feel like it's almost irresponsible epistemically to be as sure as you guys are.

[00:03:11] Well let's frame this in the right way because the way you're saying it is like I said I wasn't 100% sure that ghost... I'm not 100% sure of anything. But you were ready to blame your glass breaking, not on the scientific principles of heat and glass and cold,

[00:03:26] but like on the real possibility that ghosts might inhabit like where you were. My house? Okay, no. I think so that was that part was a joke. Like I don't think having looked it up and seen that glasses do explode.

[00:03:40] I will I do have enough Occam's razor in me to think probably that's what happened in my particular house. That's why we didn't move out. Like white people always stay in the house when there's a ghost there.

[00:03:56] But we're not those white people like we would just move out. It's the ghost's house now. Yeah, so and then to your charge of epistemic responsibility, I guess that's what it boils down to because like if you're saying that you have like this looser standard

[00:04:16] or like a different threshold for believing in supernatural phenomena, then I've sort of think that once you accept the possibility of those sort of like ghost stories and you know ghouls and zombies and leprechauns or whatever else you're going to believe. No, no, no.

[00:04:34] Then you sort of open the door like then you could believe anything. Like you might as well believe that essential oils cure COVID. Like there's just there's more evidence of that than there is of ghosts. Well, I don't know that I haven't looked at the essential oils.

[00:04:48] You haven't seen the meta analysis. I can't comment on that, but I will say that like I don't think so you and Paul more mostly you have been saying like do you believe in leprechauns?

[00:05:02] No, those are very specific things that you know, I probably don't believe in but like spiritual entities, supernatural events have been reported for you know millennia.

[00:05:16] It goes back to every goes to every culture goes to every period of time and like I think it's crazy not to be open to the possibility. Like we understand so little about our universe.

[00:05:29] We don't understand consciousness at all pretty much like I think it's just weird to take a strong anti like spirit or I don't know non material entity stance given that there's just you know this has been part of the human race for a long time.

[00:05:48] And maybe that's because of some weird evolutionary quirk, but maybe not like we don't know and that's all I'm asking for is just to

[00:05:56] I mean so so you're put your lumpy together sort of a class of things like that you're calling supernatural and you're saying like well there's evidence that

[00:06:04] or at least humans have believed in this class of thing for a long time but they've believed a whole bunch of different things and they've also been like very very superstitious

[00:06:12] and found like sort of you know believed all kinds of spirit correlations like so like let's just take a superstition that arises from a spirit correlation

[00:06:21] like you put on this pair of socks and you won the lottery and so from then you put on the same pair of socks forever more

[00:06:28] and you develop this true belief that socks help you win the lottery these particular socks up you in the lottery people have been doing that for like a long long long time

[00:06:36] right yeah I do that all superstitions yeah but but there we just know like that that's just poor evidence of a causal connection like that's just not the I'm confident saying that there's nothing there's nothing that could cause your socks to make you win the lottery like

[00:06:55] and so just because humans have been believing it for a really really long time like it's not it is not enough evidence for me like we've been a superstitious scared

[00:07:04] lot for a long like a long time you mean like jinxing or whatever or the reverse jinxing yeah what you're saying like all those kinds of superstitions that arise it's hard to come up with a category that would capture but I mean like those things that happen when

[00:07:18] you you put one thing together with another thing just like just merely because post hoc ergo proper hot kind of thing and and like the parsimonious explanation for all of those superstitious beliefs is just like some sort of tendency to see patterns where there are none

[00:07:33] and I think like that that all of the things that are claimed to be supernatural like it's striking to me that we've never actually captured any like evidence

[00:07:45] of a supernatural so like what you're saying sounds like you might be saying like well there are parts of the natural universe that we don't know

[00:07:52] and sure like I totally believe that like there might be but but there might be there's a there is like 90% like yeah sorry I mean 85% of the universe is dark matter which we don't understand and it's just like a word or a concept that doesn't right like yeah

[00:08:08] but the people who study dark matter understand enough to have developed a scientific theory about it right so like it's weird to rely on that as like

[00:08:16] the I'm relying on it only to point out our epistemic situation which is not very good when it comes to understanding the basic nature of reality

[00:08:27] because when it comes to the universe which we thought we had a much better handle on until people realize that galaxies weren't operating according to

[00:08:36] the normal laws of gravity and so so we posit this thing which we can't detect in every in any way and we have no more evidence for other than its effect

[00:08:48] or or what we presume is its effect now it really just the only evidence for right is that our other good theories don't seem to run afoul

[00:08:59] when presented with this new data and so it's an epic cycle it's an epic cycle it's like Pony is a cycle thing

[00:09:06] well so we have systematic evidence of like say the motion of galaxies and stars and clusters of stars and that doesn't conform to the amount of matter that we thought was in the natural universe

[00:09:18] so we posit this like sort of unknown entity just like we used to posit atoms before we were able to observe it just like we posited black holes to account for

[00:09:25] just as a purely theoretical thing to account for observations and then we eventually found evidence of black holes we will eventually find some evidence of dark matter

[00:09:33] and we will keep learning about the physical universe it's what what I don't what I the step that I don't want to take is to say that there is something above and beyond

[00:09:44] the the science like so so like to posit a supernatural agent is to really say like there is a realm there's a there are egentic forces that are acting in this world

[00:09:57] and there's never been not even like with dark matter where you have like the mathematics of gravity is telling you something is there there is strong triangulating evidence telling you something is there there's nothing

[00:10:07] except there's like five billion reports of sightings like over the course of history there are one billion people who believe in Muhammad and they're like close to a billion people but they don't say that they've actually encountered Muhammad

[00:10:18] they believe it for some other reason but a lot of Christians say that they've encountered like I think you have to take people's testimony seriously and not just assume that they're crazy or deluded or psych they have psychosis or something like that as an

[00:10:33] as an epistemic agent myself the fact that so many people across so many periods of time and so many cultures including like people I have so much respect for and think our total geniuses like Mark Twain for example

[00:10:46] the fact that so many people have have claimed to have witness he claimed to have witnessed a couple of miraculous healings and and some sort of supernatural I don't remember I've read about this a long time ago but he was very interested in the supernatural and pursued it

[00:11:07] with and you know this is Mark Twain he is not some cook Mark Twain is not a scientist like I don't he's not a scientist but science doesn't like explain that see this is what it boils down to you are like a science you have

[00:11:21] you're a scientist whatever the fuck people say when they're making this accusation like you just think like science if science can't explain it then it definitely doesn't exist but I don't I just don't think any reason we have epistemically from the standpoint of having to look at

[00:11:38] subject science to the same standards we subject everything else to I don't see why we should believe that well like it would be very very easy to get a person before and after a miraculous healing and just demonstrate that it had occurred

[00:11:51] how would that be easy why because there are plenty of sick people right if there is one person one person among the seven billion in this world who says they have the capacity to miraculously heal who could actually bring someone forward

[00:12:06] say this person we all agree has like tumors riddled through their body and now like I'm going to do my incantation and they don't oh yeah it wouldn't be that difficult to gather evidence for that but for like a visitation

[00:12:17] or some sort of an object yeah the motion of an object like your glass or something like that that had zero explanation around every time that like we investigate some of these reports we come to find like pretty mundane explanations for what people saw and with I guess I just

[00:12:34] not I'm not convinced a that I think the vast majority of these things haven't been investigated scientifically and I think a strong a large percentage of the ones that have if they have I mean like the healings or whatever the Yuri Geller I can move pages that

[00:12:50] that that I agree is bullshit there are people who are con man and who will but but people have believed in psychic phenomena for like Balena right so I guess what I'm asking just does somebody

[00:13:00] distinguish between yeah how do you distinguish between you're using the weight of like the number of people who have believed in like ghosts for instance as the one and only source of evidence but but plenty of people believe in psychic phenomena like just as many

[00:13:15] right but just because people have believed false things doesn't mean that they're false is what I'm saying how do you know that they're false like how do you know that the beliefs in psychic powers are false

[00:13:25] well like there have been some good debunkings of those things right and I guess I don't know in fact like maybe yeah and maybe like healing it like this is not one that I've sort of in my layman's way kind of looked into it all it doesn't interest me as much for whatever

[00:13:44] reason is this idea of like somebody being able to move a cup with their head or something like that the healings is interesting because I remember that was something that Mark Twain was amazed by and somebody that I think would be hard to fool in the way that you might fool an ordinary

[00:14:04] I mean interesting so Sir Arthur Conan Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that he was a sucker for the supernatural and he and Houdini were once friends and and sort of parted ways because during the the sort of rise of spiritualism and Europe in

[00:14:20] America Sherlock home I mean Conan Doyle was like just buying it whole whole cloth and the people who were demonstrating the psychic phenomena were people like Houdini would tour the country showing that they're the methods by which they would fool people

[00:14:36] and so they were like the magic community has long been sort of debunkers of all of this stuff and so they would go and do the same things that psychics did and show how they did it yeah and they had a falling out so like it's not that I want to attribute stupidity to these people

[00:14:50] I just I think that we I guess we just have a fundamental disagreement about what would constitute evidence and like I do think that we understand enough natural law that if we have if it natural law has a shot at explaining something that that would be the default and not deposit supernatural entities

[00:15:08] I don't posit them right like I like I want to be clear I'm agnostic about them but seriously agnostic not in because it's such a broad category of thing spiritual entities and because of its really widespread I mean it's amazing you look at

[00:15:27] you read Homer you read Shakespeare you read you know the eastern texts and ghosts and spirits and all sorts of things are all over those texts and I'm sure you could come up with a theory that might explain that stuff away but since I don't have that theory there would be no way to test that particular

[00:15:46] theory I'm I just am open to it like and I just think that's the like just having a little epistemic humility when it comes to a subject like this is the right stance I I reject your use of the term humility to push me into believing things for which there is no evidence

[00:16:05] right so like I the only evidence that you can come up with is people's is people's reporting and so of course it would be a difficult task to go point by point and refuting every single like claim but so many claims that have come forward have been debunked like even the oracles right we know like the oracles

[00:16:26] were just getting super high off of whatever natural gases were escaping those caves right there was nothing supernatural about it there was just like going on a trip right and for centuries millennia people believe that these were people who were in touch with the spiritual world

[00:16:40] but now that we have a decent explanation for it seems like oh yeah this is just one among the many things that we know we we people used to think one thing and now we think we know that that's not true like it would be difficult to go through all of that does happen yes but it also like that's you know what else happens is that

[00:16:55] those scientific theories turn out to be totally wrong flogest on but by we know it we know it because of science right like so yeah the reason that we know that those scientific theories like what just on was wrong simply because we did more science right so like we have a really robust method to figure

[00:17:10] out when our theories are wrong that's not possible for supernatural claims right but given that it's such a small sub I'm all I'm saying is the principle of here's a category of thing that in a small fraction of the cases when people have investigated they have determined it was faked doesn't mean that that category of thing doesn't exist or that that's

[00:17:33] or even that like the method of acquiring what you consider to be evidence is faulty in this case it would just be testimony so all I'm saying is that like you know the yes there have been charlatans there have been con men that have been exposed but that doesn't mean that they're not the phenomenon that people have been reporting for thousands of years is something that we shouldn't believe in that we should deny like that just seems

[00:17:52] overly dogmatic like that's the funny thing is like it just seems that's my that's the reason I'm so surprised is there's a kind of dogmatism there's kind of like pro materialist dogmatism to this view it it's not dogmatism to draw a line like in what you're wondering about

[00:18:08] and I think that if it were true that supernatural entities had any sort of interaction with this world isn't it weird that not once anybody has been able to demonstrate that like not a single time that you're not able to do that

[00:18:16] it's not dogmatism to draw a line like in what you're willing to believe in what you're not and I think that if it were true that supernatural entities had any sort of interaction with this world isn't it weird that not once anybody has been able to demonstrate that

[00:18:37] like not a single time all we have is testimony so like you know the amazing Randy put out this dislike I don't remember how much it was but it became like a half a million dollar prize for anybody who could come into the lab and demonstrate psychic phenomena

[00:18:52] like nobody could like there's nobody isn't it weird that we won't have anything other than just people saying they saw something

[00:19:00] the people from the spirit world don't want to like try to claim James Randy is a million dollars like that doesn't seem weird to me but like I agree like if you want to say that those psychic powers that people claim to have the most common ones like telekinesis

[00:19:15] we have reason to doubt the existence of those things based on the debunking that has occurred I would agree with that but I would say that that still leaves a whole class of I guess you'd call them supernatural above natural

[00:19:32] more than what we think comprises the natural world there's a whole class of those things that I wouldn't put in the category of I believe in and I wouldn't put in the category of I don't believe in I'm just like I'm I guess I'm happy having this huge set of things that I just don't know

[00:19:54] I mean I am too I just think that like the natural world provides so much wonder and the more and more you know have you ever heard the term the God of the gaps

[00:20:02] yeah like the more and yeah so the more and more we learn the less and less there is room for those supernatural explanations like we see that they were actually not the right explanations and and I feel like it's it's

[00:20:13] not dogmatism closing oneself off to believing in supernatural phenomena it's sort of just accepting with certainty some of the things we do know about the natural world like for instance that we've never ever had any real evidence other than people saying they saw a ghost

[00:20:31] we have zero evidence that they exist and like people saying that they saw something or heard something or did something is not enough evidence for me to to right like I would keep my mind open if like there were actual evidence

[00:20:46] right the number of dark dark matter like there's a ton of evidence for dark matter we just don't know what it's made of

[00:20:51] yeah I guess that we take different lessons from that like so first of all I you know if it had been just a handful of people you know over the you know certain period of time I would agree that that's not enough but but but the the

[00:21:06] the testimony in these cases and the way it's sort of built into the fabric of so many cultures like that I think comprises enough evidence for me to be agnostic about it because like it doesn't have to be like scientific experiment was able to confirm

[00:21:24] or you know not falsify or however you think science works you and lack ends but like the yeah it's amazing by the way it's it's incredible how tough you are at accepting social psychological evidence you become like the most dogmatic person in the world about

[00:21:41] like the rigorous nature of what what it required to show that a psychological effect is real but you're like the ghost maybe I put those also in the category of I don't know and I think that's roughly the same reason to believe both things

[00:21:57] and and and I think there's something that is going on with your lumping together of all those because a lot of those claims are contradictory and like you know people talking about you know people who believe that the Virgin Mary exists and say they saw the Virgin Mary

[00:22:09] are very very different than like people who say that they you know believe in some spirit mother earth and that she created like it's they're super different so lump them all together like the only category that I can figure out that that like includes all of those is like crazy

[00:22:27] wow right so here's what I would say about those things right like I think what you may have is some sort of weird that like something that we can't even conceptualize because we don't have the concepts for it because of all the

[00:22:43] of all the scientific or whatever language that has been imposed by the four horsemen overlords but like I think that that certainly your culture and your own weird psychology will influence sort of if you let's say that there is some event like this

[00:23:02] you know it totally makes sense to me that some people would say oh that was Mohammed and some people would say that was the Virgin Mary because of their cultural context but what maybe links the two of them is some sort of again

[00:23:18] indescribable if you haven't experienced it event that then is seen through their prism their cultural prism so that's yeah yeah you know I agree that that's like certainly what goes on I think like just like the example that comes to mind for me is

[00:23:36] dream paralysis you know like when when people are halfway between a dream and awake and they're completely paralyzed and they often report having out of body like they can like almost like they're floating above their body and so like different cultures would have like different accounts for what that is

[00:23:52] that second process like the culture is giving you the tools to interpret what you saw like I'm totally down with I just don't I just think they're more likely to be in the class of things like oh it was dream paralysis it was something that we can explain

[00:24:05] you know that I think Rodney Asher who did room 237 yeah he did a movie about dream paralysis oh no yeah he did it's called the nightmare yeah we might look at that oh yeah oh yeah 2015 so so you know you said something earlier in a text to me that that I'm actually very curious

[00:24:32] about and that is that you think a lot more people who listen to our podcast would be more on your side of things than on my side no I don't know how to I said that you I agreed that you that they would more would be on your side but that you would be surprised at the number of people on my side

[00:24:51] yeah okay so we can test that so like I would be surprised if more than 20% of people said that they believed in supernatural phenomena is that no no no but it can't be phrased like that this is like a poll so this is like the political polling is how you frame the question that all I think

[00:25:09] we've both made our cases right like just are you are you in Tamler or David's position yeah not do you believe in leprechauns which is how you would want to frame it or don't you

[00:25:20] right or that you would frame it like are you a dogmatic believer in the same Sam Harris religion of science I wouldn't frame it that way because then probably you would win

[00:25:32] yeah I don't know the best way to go about testing this other than telling people I don't want to get a lot of email but I actually want to know

[00:25:43] yeah well no I think you could we could put out a Twitter poll or something like that but I think it just has to be you know for people who have heard this episode although you can't trust them yeah that's the problem

[00:25:53] and also like there might be sort of supernatural people who are weighing in but I guess that would only help me the only evidence I have for anything supernatural ever ever happening is that time I had sex with a demon but I draw the line there

[00:26:08] that's what I think of this must be it must be like that you just some demon came in and just had sex with you like multiple times and so you're just saying that that couldn't have been real that yeah he didn't mean to hurt me I deserved it

[00:26:23] I deserved it but it is true that like I you know as as you know in many of us know I grew up in a very very religious household who believed in not in not in ghosts as in the spirits of people who die coming back

[00:26:38] because they're very actually some damn to serve very clear that those don't exist but they believed in like the devil and fallen angels what we might call demons actually having a role in the world

[00:26:50] and like you know they would attribute people like in my family would attribute David Copperfields flying across the age to like what most certainly must have been some devil's bargain that he made

[00:27:00] and I used to even say like you know I don't if God exists maybe he doesn't want to talk to me but like at least if the devil or a demon showed up in my room

[00:27:11] and like then I would like have some firm firm evidence to believe in but but you know I've like William James as interested in religion as I am I have not once had a real religious experience

[00:27:22] well so like when we have this fight over text you ask me if I believe in some specific thing

[00:27:29] well you said ghosts yeah I mean and I mean ghosts in a very broad sense but like you know somebody believes that the devil which is you know the more specific they get the more I think that's probably

[00:27:41] bullshit I am just open to the broader range of phenomena that I guess would be called supernatural because they don't fit in with our current understanding of natural laws

[00:27:57] and I'm just open to that I think that is the right epistemic position to be in now it's not a comfortable one because you're you don't know if they exist and you don't know if they don't

[00:28:07] and maybe you're leaning in one direction or another maybe I'd probably lean your way but I'm so much more open to the possibility I think than you are which is what our disagreement boils down

[00:28:18] and yeah and I think to summarize my stance it really is that there is a point at which I think it's dangerous to believe in things without what I'm saying with no evidence

[00:28:35] and once you open the door to that then you open the door to believing in a whole lot of things and so while I totally believe that there are features of the natural world that can't be explained

[00:28:44] even ones that might actually influence our world in weird ways I have zero reason like if I'm a good Bayesian like the prior that I said is zero to believe that there is like a real supernatural entity that has ever affected this world

[00:28:57] but so as our disagreement just boiled down to like I'm a frequentist you're a Bayesian you p-hacked into believing in ghosts I want to call your theory the theory that dark matter makes Satan do bad things Satan is dark matter dark matter and consciousness make leprechaun exist

[00:29:20] so we had because Paul was on the episode where he said this and he expressed shock he shared with us a message that he got from his son Zach Bloom who's an avid listener of a very bad wizards who just texted him does Tamler really believe in ghosts

[00:29:35] it really is such like we are in a disenchanted age I contrary to what you say about that I think that the enchantment for me just comes through the wonder of science you know I'm like a Carl Saganite right where I'm like wow billions and billions of stars

[00:29:50] that's also awesome yeah you know that doesn't have to be either or right like I'm just saying if there is a supernatural entity in this universe that can actually appear to me please appear to me like before we record the next episode

[00:30:03] appear to David not to me because stuff freaks me out may god have mercy on your soul Tamler I hope so especially now you're gonna just have that seventh day Adventist devil like just banging you every night he's gonna ravage me tonight

[00:30:26] and I'll be like I am sorry I tried to you know I tried to warn you but I'm gonna be like what the hell are you doing alright let's come back and talk to Jesse single this episode of very bad wizards is sponsored by better help

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[00:35:39] we just did an episode I believe we mentioned it we dropped one on the Sopranos episode college from season one you did something that I think will be very helpful to all of our listeners you assembled all of our bonus episodes and you put the links to them

[00:36:00] on our theverybadwizards.com support page so if you're a Patreon listener it will show up in your feed but you kind of have to scroll to find them because you also get the ad free episodes in that same feed

[00:36:14] but now this yeah so you'll have a whole backlog of bonus episodes and Dave you if I'm not mistaken just put out volume five of your beats is that right? yes that's right I had this weird spurt of creativity and work and so volume five

[00:36:38] of the Beats Without Rhymes is out there on our Patreon dollar and up subscribers can get access to it it along with a couple of the other ones are on SoundCloud so you get the private link there and yeah so please

[00:36:55] and I don't care if you share it but oh and you also if you're a $5 and up per episode supporter you'll get to select an episode just put out a call for topics I suggest putting voting on an episode that will require Tamler to read an entire book

[00:37:15] to prepare now they like you preparing I think they realize that I'm the one that does most of the preparation usually yeah trying to balance out the karma so for but in addition you will get our five episode mini series

[00:37:35] on the Brothers Karamazov that we did over the summer so if you go directly to your feed you can also buy that for $5 on Himalaya if you would like finally we now have mugs that's right so in addition to the t-shirts if you go to our page

[00:37:54] now rather than just a merchandise tab there's a t-shirt tab where you can buy our wonderful t-shirts and hoodies at Cotton Bureau but we also just put out some mugs to satiate our audiences craving for drinkware you can drink vodka or scotch out of those mugs

[00:38:13] it doesn't just have to be coffee but yeah I really like the design I have them right here Tamler said to you so I got an order one so yes I think they only ship in the United States for now for now

[00:38:32] yeah I got a double check on how to get that internationally apologies to all our wonderful international listeners who have let us know in both comic and sometimes complaining ways that it doesn't ship overseas or to Canada yeah thanks everybody alright let's talk to Jesse the Jewish clap

[00:38:55] the Jewish clap I once got a case of the Jewish clap it's rough sorry I should say it'd be incredible I'm sorry you should take that is that going to be part of your five in the Catskills? my type five alright well we're happy to welcome Jesse Single

[00:39:14] how do you pronounce your name is that right Single? Jesse Single yeah Jesse Single welcome to the podcast thank you for doing the research to pronounce my name correctly I mean always that is a staple of this show we probably over prepare

[00:39:29] yeah always on the first take no less yeah no less we're no journalists thank you I've listened to you guys for years and I just have this like this build up a very bad wizard shtick honestly so I might inflict some of that on you nice

[00:39:43] did you guys know that if you take the song All Star by Smash Mouth and you rotate it in 11 dimensions it still sounds good and therefore Neil's Bore theory of the atom is incorrect that's your very bad wizards shtick

[00:39:58] that's all I got it took me hours to write that luckily your book is better written so we're going to talk a little bit about your book although we are not that kind of podcast where people do book promo but we're making an exception

[00:40:10] where fans of your work and this new book which is a measured critique of social psychology I guess we'll talk about that a little bit in the beginning and then we'll get into some culture war stuff so I'm going to go ahead and say

[00:40:22] I'm going to go ahead and say I'm going to go ahead and say I'm going to go ahead and say don't get used to going into some culture war stuff so Dave what did you think given that he was attacking your entire profession so you know

[00:40:37] so I already knew that Jesse was going to be decent and do a he was going to be conscientious in his coverage of the science but one I told this to Jesse offline I think this is very like he's just a great writer so I enjoyed

[00:40:55] I actually only plan to read and I found myself reading more. Thank you. And that's a lot, that's saying a lot. Yeah, no, I don't read anything. But the things, here's the thing, maybe this is just too because I'm inside baseball, the things that you cover,

[00:41:12] I'm sure that the wider audience doesn't know about, but these have just been sort of like the knowledge within social psychology that some of the stuff just absolute crap and bullshit. And I don't know what the audience of people who read science writing,

[00:41:28] like how much they know about this, but this, I wasn't surprised by any of the criticisms you were offering, although I did learn a little bit more about say Marty Seligman and just total. Holy shit, we're gonna talk about some positive psychology, like a bigger,

[00:41:44] I knew it was a scam, but man, I didn't realize the scope of the scam. I didn't say scam, they said scam. My critique of my journal measure, especially for legal purposes. You called it a scam olay, I think. A big scam olay.

[00:42:00] So what I wanted to ask you was just in general, when you started writing this book, which as I see from your self-promoting tweet was four years ago or something like that, the lay of the land was different, right? So this was, it was still, I think,

[00:42:18] like controversial that say power posing might not be replicated. In the interim time, as you've been writing, have you at least seen the field changing? Like have you seen us, like your outside observation of us as psychologists improving? Yeah, I mean, yes I have.

[00:42:38] And I think the field is reforming itself, particularly social psychology, which had the most reforming to do. My sense of like, in terms of the emails I get from readers who aren't psychologists, I think a lot of people still don't understand. Like I listened to your guys IAT,

[00:42:55] implicit association test episode. We might have some disagreement there, but like the Today Show ran a glowing segment on the IAT I think two weeks ago that didn't have a word of sort of the countervailing or skeptical evidence. So I think especially for ideas that launched themselves

[00:43:07] with like a 30 million download TED talk, the debunking often travels only a 10th as far. So I think the average reader might not understand just how shaky some of these ideas are. Yeah, it's so crazy for me to even think

[00:43:20] that people would still, I mean, I know it's true. You're right, like people do implicit bias training and it's just like, I mean, as much as I'm actually more sympathetic to what the IAT is trying to do, there is zero evidence that that shit works as training.

[00:43:35] Yeah. That's just incredible. It's depressing. And I mean, one of the points in my book I hit at over and over is if you're like the HR manager at a corporation or you're the superintendent of a school system, you're offered this menu of options

[00:43:46] and like you're not qualified to evaluate them. Like who knows how to evaluate stuff? It's hard. So you can't really blame people for just like reaching for whatever's on the shelf and using it. Yeah. And that comes across in the positive psychology stuff at the highest levels, right?

[00:43:59] Like you talk about how the military was incorporating it, right? An army general just without really any desire to look at the research backing it. And one of the interesting things about your book is that you do go into some causes for why people

[00:44:19] are so unskeptical in how they just jump at the new thing. They're like in the Simpsons, like when the Phil Hartman character comes and sells them the Monterey, why do you think people are so gullible for this stuff?

[00:44:34] I thought you were gonna go with the Bear Patrol reference. At least I would like to buy you. I think one of the things is just like, I do think our brains latch on to monocausal accounts of why we're getting outcomes we don't like.

[00:44:48] So if you actually try to understand why racially discriminatory outcomes per system in the US, that's pretty complicated. And it's hard to sort of grasp the complexity and not all of it comes down to just sort of discriminatory intent or sentiments.

[00:45:03] If you instead get diverted to a story where it's like, oh, that's implicit bias. We're all carrying around this thing called implicit bias. And if we can reduce it, there won't be a black-white achievement gap. It's a much more satisfying and tidy

[00:45:15] and easy to latch on to story. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's being human, but when it ends up costing hundreds of millions of dollars on sort of at best pointless interventions, that's why I wrote the book. I just think it's really seductive

[00:45:29] just because we have human brains. Yeah, you kind of compare it to the condiment stuff, right? And we go on intuition with these things. At other times, it seems like they're almost making a decision to just do the easier thing. Not because they intuitively it seems right,

[00:45:46] but just because to really examine the complexity would take too much energy and it just isn't as seductive. I also think that a lot of this stuff is trying to keep the status quo in place. And this is the easiest way to do that,

[00:46:01] to have some diversity seminar, implicit bias training or whatever it is, a way of avoiding doing the real work that it would require to address some of these issues and inequities. Yeah, I mean, I lay out this theory that a lot of social psychologists

[00:46:18] have a world view I call prime world, which basically is that, the world is pretty good as is. We just have these pesky primes and biases and if we could address those and there's always some tool to address them, we'll really improve things.

[00:46:31] And I do sort of tee off on John Barge's book before you know it because he makes arguments like that unconscious priming can explain why people don't believe in global warming. And these are areas where we don't, it's not really a mystery

[00:46:47] why people don't believe in global warming. We don't need this sexy new theory to explain it. And that drives me a little bit crazy because that's exactly what you're getting to. Where it's like, that would be amazing if you could just like blast people with like a little,

[00:46:57] what are those things you use to like clean out a computer? Just like some cold air and they'll be like, oh, I get it. Every time they buy an iced coffee, they're less likely to believe in global warming. So just give them all hot coffee.

[00:47:09] The priming stuff when you really like, I mean this is not news to psychologists or philosophers who are skeptical of psychologists but the priming stuff that got published is so fucking crazy and I don't know. Dude, I was at ground zero

[00:47:22] because I started my PhD program in like 97 and my grad program had the social area had, it was located on the East Coast major university. So we got a lot of people coming to give talks and I had moved from developmental to social and I remember thinking, what?

[00:47:40] Like are you fucking serious? Like I could not believe like, App Dijkster House came and gave a talk and he did this priming research and he presented this research that ended up getting published like in science or nature or something that if you primed people with a professor,

[00:47:58] that they would do better on like a test. So it was like a trivia, it was a trivia test and he's like, if you prime people with being a professor they actually get more trivia questions right. And I remember thinking like, what the mother fuck?

[00:48:12] But like if you prime them with Einstein, well then you get a contrast effect because then they feel stupid. The one I mentioned, the book that I love is like you prime Israelis on different sides of the political spectrum and Israelis like more than almost any other nationality

[00:48:26] when they fight about politics they fucking, they go at it. Cause like, you know, Gaza Strip pull out, Palestinian rights, these researchers found you just flashed them at Israeli flag for like 200 milliseconds and it prime such a sense of unity that after that they actually have similar politics

[00:48:40] which I know that like common sense is sort of an enemy of science and you know, a lot of things that seem like common sense turn out not to be but common sense has to kick in before you publish a study like that. Yeah, yeah.

[00:48:53] Now I have a theory that if you just prime all Middle Easterners with hummus they'll actually all unite cause everybody loves hummus. They'll just start having anal sex. I don't know, I don't wanna know how that connection got made.

[00:49:06] Is it like that because of the texture of it or? You know, I don't know the mechanism but I just know that it works. Yeah, that's fair. That's a social priming research doesn't often say that much about mechanisms so that sounds better. That makes sense, yeah.

[00:49:21] Hey, piggybacking on Tamler's question or comment about this positive psychology stuff. There's one, the stuff that I found most fascinating is stuff that even I think amongst social psychologists doesn't get talked about which is why I sort of appreciated your coverage of it

[00:49:36] was like it's understandable to me if you have a theory and you wanna pimp it and you want everybody to believe your stuff but like the dark side to me of say so this is, we should be specific here. You're covering a lot of

[00:49:50] the University of Pennsylvania positive psychology worked by Marty Seligman that ended up getting adopted by the military to prevent like PTSD that just didn't work. The dark side for me, the real dark side is the funding sources and I think that like the Templeton Foundation

[00:50:10] it has funded essentially they created the entire field of positive psychology and I can't help but think that if they had been a little more questioning of the people they were funding and the results that led to more funding that this wouldn't happen

[00:50:24] but like this is just one of those follow the money kinds of stories. Yeah, I mean, I don't, that might have been true in the early days that the problem is the positive psychology center at UPenn now it sells these programs

[00:50:36] all over the world to schools, to the military. It's just sort of astounding when you look at the difference between the evidence they produced and the sizes of the contracts they get. I'm sure that's true especially early on because like the Templeton Foundation loves that stuff.

[00:50:48] I have also benefited from these online talks they do where they give you a $50 seamless gift certificate just to listen to someone talk. So I really can't back up. Oh, I benefited from the Templeton Foundation too. They're great foundation, maybe some questionable decisions when it comes out.

[00:51:02] We've all benefited from the Templeton Foundation. So can you, I wanna talk about the positive psychology stuff but maybe for our listeners who haven't diligently read your book as we have could you just summarize what you did in that chapter because it is a real sweeping indictment

[00:51:23] of the Penn positive psychology program and Marty Seligman. Yeah, so first the name of the chapter is the Ark of the Scientific Universe is long but it bends toward transparency. Sorry, I'm sorry to get back to you. I told you there was a little bit of a shick.

[00:51:39] So basically in the late odds the army had this horrible crisis where people, often kids, often 20 year olds were coming back from doing multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and they were just destroyed by PTSD. Some of them committed suicide, a lower number

[00:51:56] but these were high profile events killed their partners or killed other people. And the army through a process I explained in the book and there's some conspiracy theories about how the army hooked up with Seligman because of his not implication in the torture stuff

[00:52:10] but he was like a step or two removed from it but there's a salon article on this people can read. I didn't really find evidence to suggest that storyline made sense rather there was one particular Lieutenant Colonel she was sent out to try to find an intervention

[00:52:23] to help with PTSD and suicide and her husband read Seligman's book, Flourish and they met and Seligman sort of blew away the army and he convinced them that this program the positive psychology center had already developed called the Penn resilience program could be adapted for military use

[00:52:40] to prevent PTSD and suicide. The chapter has all the nitty gritty details but there are two main problems with this one is the Penn resilience program was designed for 10 to 14 year old school kids. It's sort of a universal program that supposedly could reduce their anxiety and depression.

[00:52:55] So right off the bat, you have sort of a giant leap like how are you gonna take a program for 10 to 14 year olds to reduce anxiety and depression and adapt that for 20 year olds about to go into a war zone like any decent sort of person applying.

[00:53:08] It's offensive, it's actually offensive. It's deeply offensive. Yeah, I wouldn't say that. I'm the measured careful journalist but that's your guys in from opinion. So right off the bat, you're like, well, you're gonna have to change that a lot. You're gonna have to adapt the hell of it.

[00:53:24] They didn't really adapt the hell of it. They pretty much presented it as is to every soldier it became a mandatory program called comprehensive soldier fitness. The other problem is by the time they rolled this out in 2009, one of the creators

[00:53:35] of the Penn resilience program co-author meta analysis where she was like, you know, this has some effect. It's statistically significant but we're not even sure it's clinically significant. In other words, we're not even sure this program meaningfully prevents and reduces anxiety and depressive symptoms in 11 year olds.

[00:53:51] So you take a program that doesn't necessarily work in that population, apply it to a different population, make it mandatory and I don't have firm numbers but a good estimate is like the army has spent more than $500 million on this and there's no evidence it does anything

[00:54:05] and there's no theoretical reason to think it would prevent PTSD because you can't prevent PTSD by telling people to hunt the good stuff and look on the bright side which are literally parts of this program. Like the reason I would say this is offensive

[00:54:18] is this is a really important thing that you're trying to do, right? Like you're sending people into wars probably wars that we have no business being a part of anyway but even setting that aside and they're coming back in record numbers with PTSD after Iraq and Afghanistan

[00:54:36] and you have a, it seems like the most solemn duty to just try to protect these people as much as they can from all the horrible symptoms you can't just put some little pretend fake bandaid on the problem, right? Like this is something that you have to get

[00:54:53] to the root of as like, you know it's a moral imperative and the way you describe it it just sounds like they're not looking for that they're looking for a cosmetic fix to just say they did something. First of all, I can't believe you're against

[00:55:07] the liberation of Iraq. I'm deeply offended by that. You prosadam motherfucker. Yeah, no, so one of the challenges of this book is like you don't want to impugn people's motives if they don't deserve to be impugned. I think I make a strong case that Seligman oversold the evidence

[00:55:24] and that he also didn't really know much about PTSD. At one point he says that, you know because PTSD causes anxiety and depression a program that in theory prevents anxiety and depression will treat PTSD. But that's very causally confused. That's like saying if you have the flu

[00:55:39] and I cure your cough, I'm curing the flu which isn't really how anything works. And he's not an idiot, right? He's not a total moron. He's not an imbecile. So he would understand that that was causally confused. You would think so.

[00:55:52] I think there's a chance he convinced himself that this program could be stretched to cover PTSD because that's sort of what positive psychology does. It takes these thin findings and tries to stretch them over big problems. I think the army was just not informed enough and convinced themselves

[00:56:04] even though there were some naysayers on the inside they wanted this to work. And it's such a wonderful image to imagine you could do this universal training and inoculate soldiers against this trauma. So, I blame them in the sense that this was a horrible disastrous waste of money.

[00:56:18] I don't think there was that much malevolence on their side. Yeah, I think you're right that malevolence isn't there but you know what there is. And I've seen this in sort of like in the behavioral economics consulting work they do. When you go into like a board meeting

[00:56:35] and you tell them about this stuff like all this cool science, they lap it up. They want to throw money at you and you don't actually have to produce too much evidence. They actually like, well, they'll be fine if you just because that's what consulting is.

[00:56:51] It's just like give us some ideas. And then like, oh, there's like if you attach like a PowerPoint slide that shows that you did a meta analysis, that must mean it works. And so like the incentives on all sides one is just like, I'm sorry.

[00:57:05] But like I think Marty Seligman is probably like just has ego problems. Like I think he probably really, really loved that he was saving the army from PTSD. I just think that it's like it serves everybody in this way that's just a perverse incentives.

[00:57:18] Like what you, one I'm important because I've offered the solution and the other person thinks that they've hired a scientist to solve the problem and boom. And then you get money exchanging and yeah. You can make a lot of money this way. Well, what you just described though

[00:57:32] the consultant coming into the boardroom and wowing everyone like that is exactly what happened here. There's a scene in his book, Flourish where Seligman says he's presenting to General Casey and Seligman says to his credit, we should pilot test this. And Seligman has this great moment

[00:57:45] which you can tell Seligman is intending I think to make himself look good. Where Casey says, General Casey, the guy deciding this we don't, you know, he's like, damn it. He literally pounds the desk. I think he says we don't need a pilot study.

[00:57:56] Your work is so good. It has been replicated so many times that we're just gonna roll it out to the whole army. I mean, he puts this in his fucking book and the point I make is like if you look at what he was saying had been replicated

[00:58:07] even assuming it had been replicated nothing had been replicated that suggested anyone could prevent PTSD. It was just such a different claim and it's a crazy story and it's weird that I could just like write about it in 2021 because it's been right out in the open

[00:58:20] for so long and only a couple of journalists have looked into it. Well, that's what I mean though and I don't think there's malevolence. That's too strong, but there's a willful ignorance on the part of these people because it'll be a magic pill that will look like,

[00:58:35] well, if it didn't work, I mean, we tried and we really had research to back this up and you have a duty to make sure that you're not getting. Sure, but how far does that duty extend when this is one of the 20 responsibilities you have

[00:58:51] and you have five other projects do and it really is just an item on a list. Because at the end of the day, everything's an item on the list and I think that's part of the problem. Well, and then you also have like it's ignorance.

[00:59:00] I don't know on the part of say the decision makers in the army or in the military whether it was willful ignorance, it's probably a lot of ignorance. I've sat in on these meetings where somebody says, well, why would you want to include a control group?

[00:59:12] Aren't you predicting that it won't work in that group? So like, don't do that one, just do the condition where it will work and you're just like, well, okay, but then we can never prove anything. So like the standards for evidence are just completely,

[00:59:24] I think not understood by probably most people. Like what does it mean to have evidence that this works? Yeah, I mean, that's honestly just not to make everything about marketing the book, but I do hope people, like lay people feel a little bit more empowered

[00:59:37] to ask those sorts of questions like what does this evidence actually look like? Because the difference between actual evidence and like evidence with mile high air quotes is gigantic. I feel like you guys are sugarcoating this and in almost surprising way. So I'm calling it an egotistical ignorant.

[00:59:54] I think the Templeton Foundation is a wonderful source of funding for journalists and academics alike. As do I actually. The Templeton Foundation is blameless and all of that. No, think about what happened. I mean, Jesse's already said it, right? They took a program that was marginally

[01:00:10] or just probably if you did any kind of rigorous study of it completely ineffective for 10 to 14 year olds and said that that would work on soldiers who are going into battle and then that will help them not have PTSD when they come back. That's insane.

[01:00:28] You don't need to be trained in scientific methodology and psychometrics or anything like that to know that that's just crazy. Again, maybe it's not malevolence but there's something pathologically fucked up about just even going in with that premise and accepting that it wasn't an insane premise.

[01:00:48] I don't disagree with any of that. I think it's just a question of how much you want the postmortem to be about moral judgment versus institutional dysfunction, I guess. Yeah. I actually do disagree. I think that you're completely overestimating the degree of scientific knowledge

[01:01:03] that A is required to go through that evidence when somebody who is selling their stick throws papers at you. You do, it does require a high degree of scientific literacy. It's easy to say in retrospect but like. No, no, this isn't Monday morning quarterbacking.

[01:01:19] How could you not ask, well, since this was done for 10 to 14 year olds, why do you think it will work on? I think it's wrong. I think Seligman knew it was wrong but if you're saying that the general in that meeting

[01:01:32] should have had like this sophisticated sense of like, well all the evidence that they're telling me is there. How, but what about the causal chain, Marty? No, they don't know. People pay so much more money for so much dumber things. Take the entire marketing and advertising world.

[01:01:47] They don't have any evidence that what they do works but they throw money at it. And this to me is just a bunch of decision makers who don't know how to make decisions about this kind of science.

[01:01:56] I think the one way you might be going too soft on them is like all these guys had access to PTSD experts. Like the army works with like some of the top psychologists in the world and they, some of them, at least one of them told me

[01:02:06] like I wasn't consulted on this. So maybe that's an easy way to explain like what they could have done differently. Yeah, maybe you could describe that. Yeah, the actual treatments. I thought that was actually like one of the most interesting parts of the chapter

[01:02:17] because it really is the quick fix because you're showing the hard and messy work that it takes to actually help. So yeah, talk about that. Yeah, I mean, so what I mentioned in the chapters there are these two like well established programs the army uses interventions,

[01:02:31] prolonged exposure therapy and cognitive processing therapy. And these have both received their own criticisms including that they're a little bit like quick fixish cause I think one of them is supposed to last like 14 weeks. But the difference is you're sitting one on one

[01:02:44] with a therapist, you're going through your trauma figuring out what your triggers are. And the point I make in the chapter is like none of this shit is photogenic. I mean, I talked to Patricia Rezic who's a pathbreaking researcher in developing these interventions.

[01:02:56] And she's like you're talking to a young man about the worst day of his life and you sometimes have to undo the army's own training. Like the army told him if everyone does your job you'll all come home alive. And that didn't happen.

[01:03:08] And it's like the comprehensive soldier fitness and selling men's whole deal jibed with like army values in a very specific way like self possession, thinking positively, doing your job. Actually treating PTSD is much more complicated than that and doesn't necessarily fit into the army's values

[01:03:24] and just isn't the same sort of like universal quick fix. So, you know, the army obviously does fund these programs but there's always been a challenge getting soldiers to actually participate in them when they come home. Partly because of stigma, partly because if you're like a poor veteran

[01:03:37] you might not be able to get to the local VA. So I just sort of frame this in terms of an opportunity cost. Like when you think of what $500 million or whatever it was could have done to actually help soldiers. That's where it gets, I think,

[01:03:47] pretty heartbreaking and infuriating. Do you ever have the temptation to go kind of full Marxist with this and think that this is how like an imperialist country stays in power. This is how you maintain the status quo at the most powerful levels of business and government

[01:04:06] is by this pretend research that will come in and sort of fix the main problems that you have in the alienated workforce. Well, we'll do mindfulness and yoga and the stuff with the military. And what did you say that Seligman was part of,

[01:04:23] may have been part of or connected to something involving the justification of the torture thing? I don't know, like I could see going that direction. No, I mean, that's one of the both arguments is that if you don't want to actually restructure society in any way

[01:04:38] you roll out these interventions and I do think the implicit association test we don't need to get into it that deeply if you don't want to, but like talk about something that doesn't even start to address the underlying causes of racially discriminatory outcomes.

[01:04:48] I mean, that's a classic example. You're telling how amazing would that be if us privileged white people could sit at a computer and take a 10 minute test and that would somehow lead to hundreds of years of racial oppression being undone. It makes, it doesn't make any fucking sense.

[01:05:00] And that doesn't mean that I'm against like some of these interventions working at the margins but just if you watch the way that IIT has taken over this conversation the last 20 years, I don't know the diversity training things are good example because you compare what white people do

[01:05:13] versus what they claim to say they should do. People will on one hand say we live in a horribly white supremacist country we need to revolutionize everything. Okay, what are you gonna do about it? Well, I bought the Robin D'Angelo book

[01:05:25] and my kids are still in private school. And I put the sign up on my lawn that says like. Refugees are welcome here if they can afford $2,000 for one bedroom. But then like put it like another bus stop in the middle of the neighborhood or.

[01:05:40] That's why I find this so fun. I mean, I have my own maybe in the culture war segment we'll get into this but the performative the online term for this among sort of dirtbag leftist is Rad Libs radical liberals people who like the status quo

[01:05:51] but wrap themselves in like radical bullshit. These are the people saying abolish the police who if the police were abolished they would be in a gated community in 20 minutes. That kind of stuff drives me crazy. I think it's I have immediately just like

[01:06:03] you guys are causing me to nose dive away from talking about my book but I agree with your overall dive. We're not that kind of show. Yeah, they're gonna buy your book anyway. So we're gonna talk about the but the IET you know

[01:06:15] I actually don't I don't know that we would disagree that much about at least the application part. The part where it's tracking where it might be tracking the actual structure of attitudes is to me I think still an open question

[01:06:29] and I think in the episode that where we covered the IET is like it would require it requires a lot to be able to do the kind of research that would show that IETs might be diagnostic of whatever kind of prejudice behavior

[01:06:42] but it's to get back to your discussion of the Seligman's program. That doesn't mean that fixing implicit attitudes would in any way actually cause behavioral change. Like that's just a crazy step. Like that the thought that you know how you can improve your IET score

[01:06:59] slow down when you take the IET. Like don't slow down enough that the algorithm will kick your data out but slow down just enough that like you can and you'll be fine. And therefore racism will be gone. And there's no evidence that it does.

[01:07:15] Like I mean people can listen to our whole episode we were over this a lot. It's idiot and I'm sure we weren't hard enough on it. Like that was early. But it becomes almost a religious belief like this important legal scholar once wrote

[01:07:26] that like a potential implicit bias interventions that if someone, I think he said if someone is found liable in discrimination case maybe give them a screen saver where there's exemplars of black achievement. So like is that really likely to be the reason

[01:07:40] for these outcomes that someone was unaware there are black judges and doctors and it's like the most over the top priming wish casting? Well, that's the thing. I mean it's just like this hand wavy these are not the droids you're looking for kind of thing

[01:07:52] where I'm like well explicit prejudice might be what you want to target. I still maintain that implicit. Or structural. Or structural stuff. Yeah either but yeah. But like I think implicit bias is like might very well be trying something interesting

[01:08:05] but I'd never believe that that thing is more important than both the structural and the explicit attitude problem in society. Yeah. That's what well that's where I land that like we have this pie of discriminatory outcomes and even if you could prove 40% of the pie was implicit

[01:08:20] to want to target that you need to be able to prove you can actually move the needle on people's behavior as driven by implicit biases. But none of this has happened. They never even proved not that it's an easy thing to prove that implicit bias is that,

[01:08:31] I mean it could be 10% of the pie for all we know. The structural stuff is so screamingly obvious like intergenerational cycles of poverty where people are cut off from any sort of opportunity but that's hard to address and that takes money and redistribution.

[01:08:43] So maybe I'm becoming a communist as I record this. Well here's another one to be a communist for like this isn't the positive psychology chapter where somebody I don't remember her name put out something that says 50% is your genetics, 10% is your environment. That's the happiness pie

[01:09:00] that selling 40% of your control. 40% of your capacity for happiness is under your control. And in your book you say they just kind of made up the genetic portion of the pie, right? Just so and I'm sure they made up or I would love. It was the environmental portion

[01:09:17] that I think they had to fudge, right? Cause they had like a heritability estimate of like 40 to 50. Well if heteribility the higher, you know they're not independent if heritability goes higher that means there's less room for our own decisions and behavior.

[01:09:29] And yeah that was a Nick Brown and Julie, Julia Rohrer. They basically showed that like this was just an arbitrary estimate and one that you know was beneficial to positive psychology because if only 10% of our happiness was within our control we wouldn't seek out positive psychologists.

[01:09:43] But it's not only that it also gives this message to the population that you're in control of 40% of your life. So if you're struggling, if you are alienated then it's your fault probably or at least 40% of it is your fault.

[01:10:00] And again that's another thing that made me think that you could take this book in that direction of even though they're not thinking at this level as they're doing the research they just want the money and the fame and maybe they're telling themselves a story

[01:10:15] in their own head. The fact that this stuff catches on is due to the fact that it discourages a more social and more structural types of reform. I'm obviously open to that argument. We should also add that America has been a land of self-help for centuries

[01:10:32] and we're just like there's something in our DNA that makes us susceptible to this bullshit. So that's part of it too. 40% of it is in our DNA. I think that Tamler just needs to adopt a growth mindset to this stuff and maybe even more go.

[01:10:47] He seemed very fixed. I can just see from his posture, he's quite fixed. Yeah, yeah, no I know. I mean my stepmother is like chair I think it's supposed to be like, yeah. It really is. It's like fucking me up a little bit.

[01:11:02] Wait that's the chair where she does all her racism? Exactly, I'm just joking. I have softened on her considerably. Kristi and I hope you can hear this. She recently blocked me on Twitter so. Blocked by my stepmother, the Tamler Summer story. Yeah, that's my memoir. Thank you, Jesse.

[01:11:20] I wanna talk about some of that culture war stuff soon but we've just talked about this stuff so much that we don't wanna belabor it too much. People kind of know where Dave and I stand on a lot of these issues

[01:11:31] but any other final thoughts, Dave or Jesse? Yeah, I just wanted to ask you what's the goal of aside from selling books? Are you looking to change the world? Like are you looking to make an impact in terms of making people better consumers of science?

[01:11:48] Like I just wanna know like what gets you going when you wake up in the morning and you sit down to write a chapter on why Angela Duckworth sucks? I just want more podcast subscribers from my own podcast. No, I mean, I don't like overhyped stuff.

[01:12:01] I don't like bullshit. I'm a connoisseur of sort of human frailty in the ways we get stuff wrong. So I think there's some hope to just educate people about this and I also want journalists to do a better job. That's why I ran so much about the IAT

[01:12:14] like a lot of that covered sucks but it's difficult because journalism is collapsing structurally and there's less and less. It's hard to be a science reporter who doesn't have to produce three shitty blocks close to day. So I don't, I have more hope on the science reform side

[01:12:26] than the media reform side but I'm just hoping to nudge things you know a couple notches better as it were. Yeah, I think that actually segues nicely into maybe a discussion of the cultural or stuff because Tamela and I were talking like

[01:12:39] I'm fascinated by this collapse of journalism and the move of people to things like sub-stack and I'm just curious about like how you see like the way that I see it is that people like Jesse Single now have the freedom to promote their own independent thinking

[01:12:59] on a platform like sub-stack and get Patreon money but you know what man, every time you say some fucking controversial shit your Patreon money and your sub-stack money goes up and you might find yourself saying more and more controversial shit just for that reason

[01:13:16] and like I think there's this narrative that this is good for independent journalism but like is it? I mean the temptation to go the full like Dave Rubin and I'm gonna fight the evil SJW's route is immense and if my strategy was like profit maximizing

[01:13:32] I would do that. I happen to have like serious ideological differences with those guys, it's absolutely a problem. I don't mean to imply that that's your motivation at all. No, no, no, but you're right. I think he was calling you Dave Rubin.

[01:13:46] Yeah, I mean a little more white now I think he's soft on white nationalism but other than that, basically different. No dude, you're absolutely right. What worries me is the siloing because I'm in a very lucky position I can make a good living doing this.

[01:13:58] I could just write the most, it's weird because the problem with mainstream media is it's horribly predictable but sub-stacks can get predictable too and I can without the influence of an editor without most of my stuff being open to the public

[01:14:10] for critique I could just churn out garbage for the next 10 years and I think make a living doing it and that's a real risk I don't really know what to do about that but there's such a huge incentive to just maximize any sort of culture war dispute

[01:14:23] and I hate that because when I get into culture wars shit it's cause I think there's stuff worth talking about and I think we need to do a better job policing our own sort of liberal institutions. I'm not in it to be like,

[01:14:33] oh fuck you people who care about racism and social justice and I think there's a really sort of gross strain of that especially on the right that I don't like and I think some people are like, oh well you must be on our side

[01:14:43] cause you wrote this piece and that's just not true at all. So this is interesting cause I think it actually relates to what we were talking about before is to the extent that this is conscious to the extent that this is motivated at some unconscious level

[01:14:56] through confirmation bias or other perverse incentives but this is a charge that people level at the IDW types is that it's a grift, right? This is a grift and now with the rise of sub-stack and Patreon as Dave said the number of people in this community

[01:15:14] has just exploded and so I don't think that you're doing this consciously. I would be extremely surprised but at what level do you think the incentives are such that you will slowly start to convince yourself that you should be making a big deal about Mr. Potato Head

[01:15:34] or that you should be thinking that critical race theory is taking over the world. Do you worry about that? Just sort of, I mean I mean as I said on Twitter when I grew up Mr. Potato Head had a giant erect penis and without that

[01:15:48] I would have been very confused sexually so I, you know I mean how else would you learn to filet? How does a young boy learn? Tamar I think these are fair points I just think the particular dust-ups I've gotten into aren't out of some ideological sense

[01:16:06] that like the other side is idiots it's because I am a little bit worried about the direction of journalism and you know the grifting charge is sort of silly because there was a three month period over this summer when suddenly police abolition was in

[01:16:17] and every fucking outlet ran a blow what we used to call a blow job interview with a police abolition advocate that was it was a press release it wasn't at all journalistic it didn't ask the most basic follow up questions. Why is that not grifting?

[01:16:28] When someone, when NPR does a really soft interview on someone who's just parroting a line that's popular on Twitter but that has 10% of the country's support But are they making money doing that? Yeah I mean if you're on get on NPR you expand your platform

[01:16:41] So maybe that's also a grift I think I mean I basically think everything's a grift that's my general theory of the case I think that anyone who wants to attack critical race theory or like make sweeping statements about critical theory more broadly

[01:16:53] like I'd like to know like what your goal is what do you think the world should look like? My gripe was sort of I've read Robin D'Angelo's book and we did a podcast episode I think she actively makes the world a worse place

[01:17:03] and actively drags us further from addressing racism and you know, I don't think it's a grift she was the number one author in the country and it should strike people as weird that at a moment of heightened awareness of racial injustice, people turn to a white woman

[01:17:17] to tell them how to address racism I think this is a fascinating phenomenon and she is the Marty Seligman of 2021 Also what does her race have to do with it, Jesse? I mean come on I'm sorry that's so cool of me You're playing identity politics right now

[01:17:35] But there is this thing and like if it's a grift to be an academic fine or be on NPR fine but that is a particular grift that we place ourselves in where the next day after releasing a podcast we can actually see the effect of like

[01:17:49] picking one topic over another on the number of tweets it gets and the number there is something that seems especially pernicious about that and not, you know again this is I think played on every side but I think that there is really what I'm interested in

[01:18:04] is this change in the structure of publicizing our works It's fucked up I mean an economist would love it because we have more information than ever before I just went through a couple weeks of like pretty intense Twitter bullshit and it directly benefited in a significant way

[01:18:20] I know and I saw you say that right and I actually like appreciate your like being transparent about this and like actually seeming to it seems to bother you as it should Yeah That's a problem like I it basically requires like self-discipline

[01:18:38] like I need to commit to doing newsletter posts that are not going to be sexy and that are about like thorny social science stuff so I'm not just like ranting about whatever and I just I don't know if you guys have noticed this but I also do believe

[01:18:51] and here maybe you can put me unfortunately in the same camp as someone like James Lindsay God forbid in newsrooms at least and on some campuses there is a genuine meltdown going on that has been going on since the summer and that affects things like

[01:19:04] whether people can express mainstream political sentiments and what kind of research they can do and I think that's real I don't think it's McCarthy era I don't think it's the end of the world I don't think we're living in like Saudi Arabia

[01:19:15] but there's absolutely a moral panic afoot about issues of race particularly among white liberals right now I think Yeah let's talk about that because this might be an area of substantive disagreement so you know media better than I do and I would believe that this is a crisis

[01:19:29] in certain areas of media whether it's a crisis on university campuses I would agree that maybe there's there's a lot of Not universe, I overstated Yeah sorry go ahead I'll clarify I'm just gonna say like a lot of annoying shit on a bunch of campuses

[01:19:44] and then maybe a few campuses the sort of usual suspects the Oberlin, the Hampshire's whatever where it really is out of control but I think the extent of it is widely overstated by people of your ilk who just talk about it as if academia as a whole

[01:20:04] is being taken over by you know critical race theory which is honestly completely insane it is crazier than QAnon I agree It's like just it's just has absolutely no basis in fact you know maybe you have to do like a dumb diversity seminar or something like that

[01:20:22] but the idea that these like gender studies professors are like running the university is clinically insane at the vast majority the vast majority of campuses in the country so when you say it's out of control in college campuses

[01:20:36] like that's a I'm not sure what you mean by that or what like what you're referring to well so look I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2006 and I just told this story actually some other podcasts some other shitty podcast not a good podcast

[01:20:49] such a podcast horror I can't believe we have you on I actually think we came on our shitty podcast if you stand on a street corner in Brooklyn wearing tight fitting pants someone will invite you on their podcast we're all podcasters here you should go on come town

[01:21:02] aren't they in Brooklyn yeah I think so but no comment I've never listened to come down at all never if you if you YouTube search woke Italian gangsters which is a come town clip I can actually recommend that but that's the only part I've ever heard

[01:21:20] okay so so I would drive I would do this 12 hour drive and Arbiter Boston where I'm from and I would listen I was fascinated by Michael Savage Sean Hannity all these assholes and they would say liberal academia is run by Marxist

[01:21:30] and I was at the University of Michigan which you would view as an epicenter that shit but I didn't recognize that at all like it it just wasn't these claims tend to be overheated and overstated I may have done that earlier what I mean is

[01:21:41] on a lot of elite campuses even though I think 90% of the people just have normal political views there is this maybe timidity on the part of administrators where when shit blows up it gets really bad and it does create a chilling effect I'm finishing up a story

[01:21:56] about a woman who briefly disrupted a white fragility training this was at a community college in Washington so not an elite school but I think it's still a relevant story she read like some four minute thing saying she didn't like the way this training was structured

[01:22:09] structured her university spent something like 250,000 dollars that's an estimate they've admitted to 80,000 but it's probably much higher based on what I know investigating her for months she was immediately kicked out of her teaching duties and basically treated like someone who had just gone to the center of campus

[01:22:24] and read from mine comp there was just another blow up in the Journal of the American Medical Association where this wait, wait, wait, wait, wait what did she say? she basically read a statement that she found the sort of Robin D'Angelo and critical race theory

[01:22:37] her I think her words not mine approached too divisive and that she thought we should be focusing more on things like unemployment and we're focusing on race too much I didn't agree with every word of it but I listened to audio it was like

[01:22:49] it was something you would have seen David Brooks writing The New York Times like every two weeks yeah, yeah and the number there are just mostly this is people reaching out to me and to other people Dean problematic and saying like my campus my newsroom are going crazy

[01:23:04] I don't think critical race theory is like controlling everything I think as someone who has written about difficult issues and got in drag for it I want it to be easy to do that within limits I'm not saying we should be like oh maybe for knowledges right

[01:23:16] but obviously to write about violence and sex and power you need to have some license to be controversial I know for a fact in media there's a real meltdown right now that's why people are sort of flocking to sub-stack to those voices I suspect in academia

[01:23:32] there's some of that going on based on the notes I get and a few stories I've heard I could be overstating it it's also not by any stretch the only thing I write about I just wrote a book about other stuff there is to be expected

[01:23:43] an increased sensitivity in discussion of racial topics and I think that that increase in sensitivity let's take we can go to the New York Times newsroom if you want Paul Bloom wrote an op-ed on this saying like no no and sometimes intentions don't matter but here they matter

[01:23:59] my reading of this is excessive as it might be people really care whether or not people are racist and there are some dog-whistly things that people do when they get up and interrupt board meetings for four minutes that may not require a hundred thousand dollar investigation

[01:24:13] but that are foul and to call it a moral panic is to diminish the importance of caring how people think about these issues now I don't disagree that a lot of this stuff is complete bullshit what I worry about the phrasing of moral panic is one

[01:24:28] the other side is moral panicking just as much about race critical race theory like I think that that is yeah aptly described as moral panic two it diminishes all legitimate claims to to actual you know to like actually point out instances

[01:24:45] in which people should change the way they talk and should change the way they treat people well you know ten minutes ago Tamler was saying that he thinks a lot of this is just sort of like papering over the real problems bullshit I wouldn't you know

[01:24:59] I wouldn't accuse him and we're talking about largely the same stuff like the same sort of so the Donald MacNeill situation that so when I say I read the Donald MacNeill situation as sort of like intra elite squabbling and jockeying for position

[01:25:15] when you read the full account of what happened or at least his side of it this was not like some deeply racist guy sort of ridiculous he got fired and I just don't I don't want that to be the environment of in which news is written

[01:25:28] I'm not arguing that this is like the worst firing in history I'm arguing that there's one particular field I care about journalism and that being very familiar with journalism and having worked for major outlets watching this unfold

[01:25:38] it struck me as something that would not have happened five years ago and that just disturbed me and you know that doesn't mean Marxist are taking over the New York Times the big letter that got sent had 150 names on it

[01:25:50] I talked to a times person who was sympathetic to MacNeill who pointed out that's like a tenth of the newsroom so it might be 80 or 90% of the people that disagree with what happened I just think you can't look at the tick talk of what happened there

[01:26:00] and not think that something weird is going on at the times and there have been a couple other incidents there too that are similar like you're clearly right that administrations and just profession like the in every profession and academia is what I'm most familiar with

[01:26:14] but it seems like this is true at you know studios at major media outlets they will just cave at the least amount of pressure just like a few people on Twitter can just get Will Wilkinson fired like just it just takes nothing right and that is that's shameful

[01:26:33] at that level I also think and this may seem contradictory that there is also a cowardice among people just like me or or you who work at these places that they just feel like they should be able to say whatever they want

[01:26:52] with just not even the tiniest most negligible risk that something like this will happen to them and that seems wrong too it seems like you should speak your mind as I have like a matter of virtue or something you should speak your mind even if

[01:27:08] there's a chance that a bunch of people on Twitter will call you out and then your Craven administration won't back you up like that's just still that's life you know and so I feel like there's cowardice here at a lot of different levels and that people exaggerate how

[01:27:25] risky or dangerous it is for you to just express your views and if those people at the times had just you know made their voices heard those people who probably silently disagreed with Don McNeill's firing for that reason that's actually something that could matter

[01:27:41] if they could just bring themselves to put their career in the tiniest little bit of jeopardy well but that's why like I think there's some utility to exposing these stories like the the one that should be going up soon I

[01:27:52] about this college trying to destroy this woman over the you know anti Robin D'Angelo thing there's emails where people talk about they were white women talking about how they were so traumatized they got dizzy and got a headache because she disagreed with the white fragility training

[01:28:06] I think we need to be able to call out bullshit like that because the harm claims are a really important part of human life and this you're harming me thing can be used to manipulate and control people and if you don't

[01:28:17] one of the points I'm making the story is this idea that harm claims have grown out of control is something everyone agrees with on the left from Sarah Shulman who's a long time leftist lesbian activist to Connor Friedersdorf who's like a heterodox whatever

[01:28:29] everyone seems to think this is a problem where you disagree with me you're harming me has become a valid mode of debate and I don't like the idea of just saying well people get fired sometimes and that robs us of agency we're abdicating our responsibility to shape

[01:28:42] our own community so I think I'd like it to be the case that when fucked up shit happens people can can speak out about it fair enough yeah yeah I am so I spoke with a colleague recently who has been sort of embroiled she got

[01:28:57] caught up in some of this stuff and she was just doing some research interview research on on how academics felt about the climate and I bring it up because when she was asking me if like I am concerned

[01:29:11] or if I like fear about like if I have any fears about what I say in my workplace and I said really like the only people that kind of scare me are the undergraduates I do see the degree to which this generation

[01:29:26] is gonna have such drastically different norms that I'm afraid it's a losing battle and so when you say like I'd like to have a newsroom where we can speak our mind I think that will be the case no but this is what this is what

[01:29:37] you people always do by which I'm my skeptics you're pretending they're making some coherent like defensible point as though this is just like I'm not defending it yeah I'm not defending it I'm saying I'm saying that's just like that generational difference is like I don't

[01:29:56] like it I actually get in arguments with my own daughter because she thinks is racist to say like just like I describe some of his eyes and she was she was like that's racist and I was like

[01:30:10] fuck out of here like how else am I supposed to describe it? Am I like it's like you can't even say you can't even describe someone as black you have to say like oh that guy in the jeans with the curly hair

[01:30:19] the one with the melanin yeah yeah there is a heightened I don't know if you see this in your daughter's generation but like I don't like it I don't like it I'm sort of resigned to it but

[01:30:32] this is the utility of the moral panic framework because this shit is the vast majority of the stuff is going on in elite spaces like this is not like so many of my daughter really your daughter is incredibly sure no but I mean

[01:30:47] like so we talk you don't think my daughter's daughter sucks I'm sorry I'm sure she's wonderful she just took her as 80s she got a very good one of those dads 40% genetic I think there's something specific going on among sort of like more

[01:31:02] privileged people that is a result of guilt and genuine concern about injustice and I think a lot of these wars over linguistic stuff and usage and diversity trainings is these are not commonly held beliefs whenever you pull people on political correctness is not a

[01:31:16] great term we do have polling data on it the vast majority of Americans are sort of on our side about this stuff so I really think there's a class component here that doesn't get the attention deserves and I'm not sure there is as deep or durable

[01:31:28] and generational difference as you think I think it might be you know our kinds of people college educated and above so that's why I think it's interesting to look at this sort of ethnographically or sociologically like the people in the New York Times Newsroom

[01:31:39] Don Donald McNeil climbed the ranks sort of the old fashion way he had he had come up somewhat blue collar these the kids in the New York Times Newsroom making a stink about this they're all from elite schools which did not use to

[01:31:49] be the case that's a genuine difference I but see I think you're right although I think it's even maybe you're even understating like it's like geographic to like my daughter she goes to a public school that's a good public school and

[01:32:04] it strikes me that they have more or less what you would sort of hope idealistic 16 year olds beliefs and they still will joke around they'll still make sort of inappropriate things but they'll also you know they they have views

[01:32:18] about what's right and they're not shy about expressing it and you know I was in a class for the first time I've been teaching Tolstoy's confession which is like his crisis that made him almost want to end his own life because he thought life was

[01:32:33] meaningless along with Camus the myth of Sisyphus just a little excerpt for that like really focused around suicide and for the first time this semester I had a student email me saying you know you might want to put some sort of content warning about that stuff because Tolstoy

[01:32:49] really gets into his suicidal ideation in the in that text and it's definitely true that nobody would have done that you know up till last two or three years because I've been doing this forever and it never occurred to me and it

[01:33:05] never clearly it's something students were reluctant to express to me if it occurred to them and now they did but the way the student did it was very respectful it was like you don't have to but I just thought I would tell you

[01:33:19] that that might be something you might consider and it was you know it was exactly sort of what you would hope and I kind of think that the student was right and you know maybe now I will put some small little thing it doesn't mean

[01:33:29] they don't have to read it they still do it's part of the course but just as a way of alerting them now I could see in different hands that story become like some new evidence that the sky is falling and that the woke

[01:33:45] SJW zoomers yeah we're taking over but like it strikes me as like a totally fine thing to have happened and you know me I'm sure it's worse at Cornell than it is at U of H Cougar's Final Four but like that's I don't know like this

[01:34:00] just strikes me as as some of its good some of its bad a lot of it's really annoying but it's not a crisis. I mean part of the problem is there is this like outrage industrial complex particularly on the right.

[01:34:14] I don't know are you guys familiar with this sort of the legend of the Oberlin Bonn-Me controversy. The one of the sushi where they there was like for years this was held up as an example of SJW's run amok that like some kid complained about cultural appropriation

[01:34:28] with regard to Bonn-Me but then like someone at either the Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed looked into it more and it was like there was no story there. It had just been misrepresented by a bunch of right wing outlets and I see. Oh that's awesome.

[01:34:38] Yeah I'll send you guys a link when we get off. I wrote about it for Intel about an example of how they should follow. I also like how racist we were to remember it as sushi. Yes that was several microaggressions right there.

[01:34:49] I don't but I'm with you Tamer like who the fuck cares if put on for something serious like you know rape or suicide mentions I don't really care about stuff like that I think stuff like that gets blown up. I'm much more concerned about stuff that prevents

[01:35:02] people's ability to actually like inquire about the world and about human life and and that's the stuff I've seen like you should be able to disagree with your fucking school's dumb diversity training without being investigated you should be able to

[01:35:14] drama should be able to put out a podcast where a dude for 15 minutes expresses light skepticism of structural racism. Someone was quoted in the time saying that because a podcast said structural racism might not be the best framing that caused untold trauma to black physicians.

[01:35:28] Nobody nobody thinks that's true it's this weird performative thing. I mean these are physicians working in they see three year olds died is anyone actually think a physician is traumatized by the fact that a white person doesn't believe in structural

[01:35:40] racism it just gets very it gets a little bit sort of cultural revolution and I'm not trying to direct comparison but it is creepy when you're like you know if you've been at the center of one of these might as well as bring up the Holocaust

[01:35:51] that it's literally the Holocaust if you could cross 9 11 in the Holocaust that's where we are. I tried to listen to it by the way I'm a way back machine that you link to was it way back machine or whatever it didn't work.

[01:36:03] Yeah and and I I for some reason it stopped halfway through but at the beginning whoever was hosting the podcast what like was saying like I thought structural racism can't be true because I don't think it was the guy who

[01:36:17] got fired I think it was whoever the host was because racism is illegal. Like that was sort of laying out the devil's advocate like this is why I was I thought he was presenting that as like how could there so

[01:36:28] be it was done but I thought he was playing the sort of yeah it was funny now I didn't get to the part. Yeah it was so here's like one of the things that like must be concerning because I think it's even concerning to Tamela and to me

[01:36:43] which is you know you and Katie just were defending I didn't hear the episode but defending this guy that British comedian dude what's his name Lineman. Oh well we weren't really defending him because we don't like the way Graham Linnan who's

[01:36:57] Oh no sorry sorry you were not defending him you were you were saying that criticizing him yeah criticizing him and wow I saw you got jumped by many of your followers for taking the wrong side and so the question in this is Tamela and I know

[01:37:15] when we when we put out a podcast where we criticize the left we're pleasing a lot of a lot of people who might not we might not want to please like they're we're not on the same team so then but then when we say something criticizing

[01:37:28] the right that they jump they jump on us like do you worry about like you have to pick your battles like you don't want Ben Shapiro people like being on your team do you. No I think it's the wrong way to look at

[01:37:42] it I mean so what when you say Ben Shapiro let's take Ben Shapiro himself has retweeted some of my stuff when you say what do you mean by him being on my team. Yeah I mean the a whole bunch of actual assholes using you and your

[01:38:00] work as evidence of the idiocy of the left and bringing along with that a whole bunch of ideologies that you I know Jesse single would reject. No I mean I wouldn't be able to write anything interesting ever if I was worried like what if this other

[01:38:19] person retweets it and that's seen us supported right. I could write about cockroaches in their reproductive system it might not be interesting to you. Well did you see chapter eight of my book that's that's we don't know I didn't get that far.

[01:38:30] I just I don't I don't like the sort of guilty association thing because I first of all I think the progressive movement in the states is pretty fucked up and that we've had to sort of lower our expectations for actual politics because it's so dysfunctional.

[01:38:43] I think there's actual internecine fighting going on to the left now that matters a lot that we saw manifested in the fact that Biden ran away with the primary despite him being none of the people who write the news who work at The New York Times who

[01:38:54] work at NPR wanted Biden to win what does it tell us that he just waltz to easy victory. I don't want to downplay that like corporations wanted him to win. I mean that is legitimately part of it but so did nice. You know church lady.

[01:39:07] But let me clarify because I don't want to like it's not I'm not making guilt by association argument. I'm making one of like personal conscience. What like what do you feel like when people so not impugning you or saying you're guilty. I'm just saying

[01:39:23] like how do you feel about the fact that like some bona fide asshole racist people would like think that you're on their side and then when all of a sudden when you criticize something then they might actually get mad at you because I saw the people get mad

[01:39:36] at you for like essentially taking a position against this comedian that went contrary to what they think you probably believe. I don't know why our problem with Graham Linnahan is he's someone who in our view like sort of mocks trans people which is just fucking unacceptable under any

[01:39:51] circumstances. All our points of contention on the stuff have to do with questions like you know what 12 year old wants to go on hormones. What should the process look like. And if you talk to actual clinicians it's not easy. It's not like an easy call to make.

[01:40:03] I don't know what I think sometimes people who follow you only on Twitter but don't read your work get a very skewed view of who you are and that anyone was surprised we would be against what this guy has done which is something we've never done

[01:40:15] ourselves. Like I'm glad that they've been disabused in that notion I guess. So just to build on what Dave was saying the I guess the issue might be obviously you can't be responsible for you know like bad people racist people use your stuff as a pretext for whatever.

[01:40:36] But on the other hand like if you're someone like me who thinks a lot of this stuff is overblown and a lot of this stuff being overblown is actually bad for the media culture and for just culture in general. Just the fact that people are distracted

[01:40:52] by fake culture or stuff like do you worry that you might contribute to that you know like when Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin or whoever just retweets your stuff. It's this is something that is part of your identity right now that you do this like do

[01:41:08] you worry about that just contributing to a larger dysfunction in the way we talked to each other about these issues. I was driving back from Boston in New York I got two emails in short order from a trans person who they just passed this really bad law in

[01:41:24] Arkansas banning youth transition which yeah this person said they were crying. They were so furious at my work on the subject they were going to send me all the obituaries of the kids who killed themselves. That was their plan that was this was the first thing we

[01:41:37] thought of. I replied with one URL which was a linked story I wrote a year ago saying these bands are a bad idea why I'm against them. People have no fucking idea whatever the people on Twitter who view me as this or that avatar of whatever if someone

[01:41:50] thinks that my. Goal it like. I disagree with Ben Shapiro on so much if Ben Shapiro retweets me thinking that we should make your kids are assessed before they go on puberty blockers Godspeed I just I just I don't know it's this moral contagion

[01:42:06] thing that bothers me and I think makes writers scared of their own shadow like what if people what if the wrong sort of person likes this like being inside journalism. Did you guys talk about either the DeMor Memo or Covington I should pull out an example

[01:42:18] you've talked about. We never we might have talked about Covington that was fucked up. But that's an example where I know because I worked at New York magazine something happens everyone in journalism goes on Twitter and sees what their friends are saying about it

[01:42:30] and that absolutely shapes the coverage and that's how we fuck up story after story after story. I would rather air more in the direction of Ben Shapiro retweets me then. Oh no what if I tweet something Ben Shapiro retweets and part of that is for the reason I

[01:42:44] just described 90 percent of people on Twitter don't know what my politics are and have never read anything I've written. I just I don't know maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way and sort of abdicating some responsibility. But when you've been through the

[01:42:54] ring around this and had so many people mad at you without having any knowledge of what you've actually written I think your only choice is to care less or to get off Twitter which unfortunately I seem to be incapable of doing. You did tweet your pineapples

[01:43:08] more often I think we should talk about your battles with certain segments of the trans community. I think it would be people would. I mean or maybe we should I don't know that much about it. I do want to ask one last thing

[01:43:24] before maybe we get to that really quickly. I don't know like there's one I was thinking about having you like a real IDW adjacent public figure. I don't think you don't consider yourself. No the IDW is stupid and all those like three quarters of

[01:43:44] those guys fucking said they wanted to vote for Trump to fight woke ism which is the dumbest opinion imaginable and one that Katie and I railed about at length because like we were furious that anyone I mean will accept all listeners. But that's the time you're going

[01:43:57] to vote for Donald Trump to fight wokeness. Anyway go ahead. But that wasn't that's not who I'm talking about like I'm not talking about the crazies like Lindsay or I wouldn't even you know I'm talking more about I don't know like the Sam Harris's

[01:44:12] and like the good ones of you guys. The good you the good you respect the respectable. Yeah exactly. So there is also this aspect I was trying to figure out like what bothers me about this as much as it does because I probably over inflate like the

[01:44:27] problem of the IDW. There's also just an element of I don't know like it's blinkered it's this kind of like they're constant like Andrew Sullivan great example someone who just now just find them completely unreadable like everything is just illiberal he'll say words like illiberal constantly like it's

[01:44:46] just not a word I feel like people should be constantly saying or mannequin like you can't get one of his newsletter things without mannequin in there. Would you say what Tamela would you say there's only two sides to the debate over using the word mannequin.

[01:44:58] Yes I would say exactly there's only it's black and white. I don't know there's something that's just lame about it and it's like an aesthetic argument for leadness. I think that's exactly it. It's an aesthetic like a version to this stuff because there is this whole world of

[01:45:13] like beauty and art and movies and like nature and literature. And it seems like all they're focused on is like what somebody said on Twitter the other day or like you know what happened at this media outlet that they only heard of today like I don't know there's

[01:45:30] something about it that feels like it's impoverished at some level. So that I don't know what you expected to say more of a question. Exactly exactly. But maybe you can tell me why that's so wrong and offensive and annoying. Sounds like you're asking me.

[01:45:51] Well OK for one thing I would say that's true some of these guys get obsessed with it. I think Sullivan writes about a lot of interesting stuff and you know he he's had trans activists on his podcast and he'll just have like a 60 minute conversation with

[01:46:04] them about disagreement which I think is important. I find mainstream media right now to be to have the exact same problem that James Lindsay has MSM MSM with three parentheses around it. Yeah. No it's the same shit man it's just as fucking the most predictable unreadable. I mean.

[01:46:22] Like I don't play video games a lot anymore but I like video games but like every article about a video game is just the same thing of like here's how this one scene could be construed as a rate. It's just they don't put any effort into it.

[01:46:33] You know what they're going to think about anything. It's just so this might be a broader problem. Like Vox culture writers are saying it's un fucking readable. It really is. So that's one part. The other part is I think there's a right way to do this.

[01:46:45] Like when I criticize that stuff like I did. I can never pronounce major Peter Pete's last name. Buttigieg. Buttigieg. Buttigieg. So I did a newsletter article about a horrible slate piece on on that guy and I tried to lay out like I think there's an actual belief

[01:47:01] system under underpinning some of the stuff. I call it like identitarianism which is this belief that like groups have these essential characteristics and this slate writer wrote a whole piece basically saying like it's bad that Mayor Pete doesn't feel more oppressed. And like that's sort of interesting.

[01:47:15] That slate is running a piece saying that you have to be a real gay man who's like gay gay. You have to say you're oppressed like I don't know how could you not find that a little bit interesting and worth diving into. I don't think that's just like

[01:47:26] throwing culture worship against the wall. I think that's interesting. That somebody on slate who probably got paid like 50 bucks to write that piece like would put that on and they published it on their online outlet that just needs to put out content constantly.

[01:47:40] I mean like I'm not saying it's not annoying and it's not wrong but it just seems like there's like an obsessive focus on that kind of stuff where like you don't have to even know that that happened. You don't have to go to sleep.

[01:47:53] I will say it just from being on Twitter too long whenever there's a genuine like free speech incident where conservatives try to restrict speech which they do all the time like some of these laws trying to ban CRT. So the story will break at 1

[01:48:04] PM and at one oh one PM everyone does the same tweet Oh where's Barry Weiss on this? Why won't she denounce this? They're just as obsessed. All it is is people yelling at each other on Twitter a lot of the time. Yeah it does.

[01:48:19] You know I like the aesthetic argument because the importance of these issues aside. It I do grow weary of the centrality of these cultural issues taking up like my eyeballs and it's just as much my faults for reading all that stuff. You know this is why like

[01:48:34] we're complaining about this before I like I I genuinely think though that Twitter like what I was alluding to before about people who might be just terrible people loving you I think is a result of the impoverished nature of information exchange on Twitter where they they just infer

[01:48:55] a lot from from a very, very small amount of information and actually get sad sometimes because you're subtlety and your critical thinking like even the way that you were like sort of unwilling to just totally blast for instance like a social psychologist because there's a more nuanced

[01:49:11] measured argument to be made that like does get lost in Twitter. Like it really is like and you're like I see what you're saying you're like why don't they fucking follow my links and read my actual opinions. They're not going to do that.

[01:49:23] No I mean I know they're not going to know that. But you can't but you can't have it both ways you can't we know they're not reading my stuff so you can't really like take seriously whatever cartoon of me. No but choose but but choosing to tweet something

[01:49:33] about like a stupid cultural issue is your fault. Yeah right. So I mean the answer is I shouldn't be on Twitter and once the dust settles through my blog I'm always saying that. No but this time guys this is a commitment device you heard it here first

[01:49:48] by fucking June 1st I will have underpaid some 20 year olds to post my shit for me so I can take advantage of the platform without having to get involved in this shit. I can't be on Twitter anymore so that's a good bet. Yes single pledges to sexually harass 20

[01:50:04] year old intern to get by the way I think you know this but you know I'm using you specifically as this example to make this point not because I'm actually impugning you for being on Twitter. This is like I think just it is part of the problem.

[01:50:18] I mean this people act like Twitter doesn't matter but journalists spend fucking 12 hours a day on Twitter of course it matters to journalism and often to academia. I mean it's bad. As I was trying to figure out what to talk to you about I

[01:50:29] was like oh like you tweeted something three days ago. Wait no I tweeted some two days ago that might be interesting. No no like what like you have it's all 15 minutes. It's 15 minute chunks of outrage sometimes not your tweets but like just the world. It destroys your brain.

[01:50:44] It was a really bad invention and I'm sad I got sucked into it but I hope it helps me sell some books at least at least for some upside maybe. I'm sure yeah I'm sure it will. I guess we're running way long we should probably stop.

[01:50:56] I guess we're not going to have a nuanced conversation of anything involving your battles with the trans community but I mean I don't know like I don't know that much about it. It seems like a lot of people are making stuff up. It feels there's definitely

[01:51:10] a ton of animosity and antagonism and I are directed at you on this like to a fevered pitch at certain points although maybe that's better that's died down a little bit I don't know but like do you have any idea how that happened and what

[01:51:27] degree of responsibility you bear for it is it just. I think I think if you're like a trans person you probably have bad encounters with the medical system and you probably had people doubt the sincerity of your identity and doubt that your identity is real so

[01:51:44] anyone listening this the article I'm most controversial for was an Atlantic cover story about diagnosing trans youth like younger kids when they should go on hormones which remains like a pretty complicated question in a way it sort of isn't for adults although medicine's always complicated.

[01:51:59] So I think like if for a community that's experienced a lot of trauma and questioning and gatekeeping I can understand how a cover story in a major outlet that is maybe too nuanced for their liking could be frustrating and I get that my beef has always been

[01:52:15] that like from my view you know including that email I got yesterday people seem to be responding to a version of me that doesn't really exist and claim I make arguments I've never made and I stand by the Atlantic cover story and I think it's a

[01:52:28] perfectly serviceable guide like if you're a parent going through this or if you're a young person trying to explore your identity you know you could absolutely make a good faith argument I should have shouldn't have emphasized what I emphasize but I at the end of the day

[01:52:41] I stand by it. I do think I've sometimes gotten in the muck on Twitter and gotten in fights with people I shouldn't get in fight with and definitely been too defensive and like you know a little bit spectromy about my inability to let stuff go if I'm

[01:52:53] allowed to say that I don't mean that you're the most you're the most self-aware self-destructive Twitter person I know. Yeah. It's like you light yourself on fire and you're like I am lighting myself on fire I probably should stop. Yeah. The other difficult thing has been watching people

[01:53:09] some with big platforms publicly say I shouldn't be allowed to write for anyone again. One guy said that that all my my social network should abandon me that it's an ethical choice to choose to be friends with me. I've asked these people have some kind of

[01:53:21] conversation so I could hear exactly what they disagree with me about. They never they never do so yeah. I sort of feel like I spent a lot of time responding to shit I've never written. I'd like to spend more time responding to stuff I haven't.

[01:53:36] So I like it's obviously been a huge part of of your life in the past few years and like when I've dug into like these fights that you have with people just for the record like I of course like I'm concerned that trans

[01:53:58] people I might know and love would be upset that you were on my podcast. Yeah. But these people really are making shit up. These people are really trying these people meeting a small but loud subject not a very small. That's exactly right. I actually think that like

[01:54:15] most people like not to this sounds insulting, but most of them probably don't know who you are like most. How dare you. But like most of these people it's a particular kind of like of gas lighting that they've tried to put you through that is ugly. And and

[01:54:34] I am like I do believe that there is a valid question that somebody might have as to why you would write that article, why you would choose to focus on that. That discussion can be had. But that's that's not right. I'm sure you have reasons like

[01:54:50] I'm not saying you don't and like it's interesting to you and fine. I think the extent of the argument that ignited this is simply like are you silencing people? Are you are their parents who might turn to your article and say like see,

[01:55:03] Johnny, don't play with the Barbie. But that's beside the point. Like what I want I really want to just point out that if anybody does any real digging, there is there is no evidence that you've been what they say you've been. Yeah. No, I mean, I appreciate that.

[01:55:17] I just think like just read the fucking article. I mean, I don't want to be dismissive, but the. I present in a positive light I trans kid who had misactomy double misactomy at age 16 and people are so online. They don't understand that like to

[01:55:32] most of the country, that's still a weird and new idea. My argument is basically as long as kids are well assessed, like I think that might be the best path for some kids. Yeah, I would just say read the article and people can just

[01:55:42] email me if you have a question about my work, email me. It's just having to respond to like pretty deranged accusations from a tiny subset of the community and plenty of cis people. Some of the most aggressive people are cis people who have a chip on their

[01:55:57] shoulder. It's got entiring, but I, you know, I think I responded to all the major critiques on behalf of right. Those are the worst people in these blowups are the I'm offended on behalf of other groups, people. Well, I apologize for spreading all those lies about you.

[01:56:11] I thought I was doing well, but that's the thing I did sexually harassed you and I groomed you. Yeah, like I have I have receipts like I have Jesse Beach dick pics. That was OK. That was the moment I realized things would be better was when a prominent

[01:56:24] colorful internet personality publicly announced that that she had receipts for my behavior, but she wasn't ready to show them yet. And like immediately people pledged like I think $50,000 if she would release the receipts which she hasn't yet. So it's a weird social psychology thing the way this these

[01:56:41] pylons were, but that might be subject to another day. Well, you shouldn't have criticized us in your book, then we would come to your defense with our social psychology. I give you guys a shout out in my my overdue replication wrap that Pizarro is producing.

[01:56:53] You guys you guys are my friends. So I'm looking for that. Oh, good. Did you do you think this has radicalized you because it seems like a lot of people who have been unfairly attacked then get a little bit radicalized by that for completely understandable reasons.

[01:57:09] I'm sure it's a very natural tendency. Do you think that's true of you to any extent? I think it's I'm stealing the same answer from my co-host, but I think co-host, but I think it's made me a little bit more skeptical of this idea that like

[01:57:21] liberals are just like better or smarter and more science-based. I mean, I am liberal, so I do think that to some extent, but I think it's made me more skeptical. I do worry that if you fall down this wormhole of just like internet bullshit and these

[01:57:33] complaints about campus bullshit they fucking aggressively recruit you like the real reactionary types. They want you. They want you as like a victory for them. So you need to be careful of that. But I just like and they'll give you a lot of money. Well, OK, people say

[01:57:48] that. No, but seriously, like how many you say that? Well, no, to be the actual Dave Rubin level grifter, there are not a lot of slots for real money. And there's just as many slots for like Robin D'Angelo and like the woman who wrote it's all terrible.

[01:58:03] It's all terrible. Anyway, this is a concern, but this is all the all the more reason for me to use my good luck of my podcast and newsletter success to focus on like long form writing, which is what I plan to do. And that

[01:58:13] keeps me out of the shit. I'm so much more satisfied by long form writing than the cultural or bullshit. So I'm going to do more. Can we? That's awesome. Yeah. Can we take a step way back? I just want to say that I know

[01:58:24] that probably I know for a fact that we we used to have the most popular podcast on fireside dot fm. But I think that you got on the whole thing. Well, I know the owner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're saying another certain podcast now we're dwarfed.

[01:58:41] I'm saying another certain podcast that likes to bill itself as the only podcast has has probably not the only we were the first the first first. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Cheers to that was all we had. That was all we had. You know, it was all we had.

[01:58:58] It's all we could make our children proud of us with. It was it was just, you know, and you took if it's any consideration from along. You guys pioneered the format of two unrelatable assholes talking 90 minutes without that Katie and I never could have made this happen.

[01:59:12] What? Yeah. Tamler just got glad we were profitable. Tamler just got accused of being barely Jewish, by the way. So I feel like barely Jewish. I bet that's not an accusation people level at you that off. Fuck you. That was actually that was very

[01:59:29] anti-Semitic what you just did. I was going to say the format of some like vaguely diverse host and some like barely Jewish host. Can I say just one thing about the replication rap before we sign off? Yes. So I'm very overdue getting our patrons this rap

[01:59:45] about the replication crisis. Pizarro was nice enough to be my producer and I sent him my verses, one of which is people idealize science. That's a fact you think that PhD spells God from the way that they act. And when he said it back to

[01:59:57] me, he added himself at the end of that be like, Fuck you, Jesse. And I'm so happy. I'd never been happy. A lot of people have said Fuck you, Jesse, to me in my life. That would be so happy. I was like Dr. Dre on the boards.

[02:00:09] I was like, I was like Dr. Dre. Thank you guys both for having me. I have listened to you guys forever and it's an awesome podcast. And there's definitely some very bad wizards in our podcast. Thank you for this was fun. Thank you for joining us.